Thank you for a really good post.
Erik Moeller wrote:
I know there are some who want to use this opportunity to cement a different relationship - "WMF as servant", without a say. ("You are the servant, not the master, and your opinion doesn't matter very much." [1]) I understand that - I think it's rational, and justifiable, and may even be the better direction in the long run. I personally happen to disagree strongly with that belief, and the organization's leadership certainly does, as well. I hope we can find a middle ground, and I know that some of this is also just a reaction.
I appreciate the candor here and the recognition that there are acceptable yet radically different views of how the Wikimedia Foundation should fit within the Wikimedia world.
What's happening here is painful and difficult, and I'm sorry for our role in that. I do believe it's necessary that we work through this, and on a personal level, I honestly care more about doing that and achieving some clarity on our working relationship with each other, than about any specific outcome.
Re: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_configuration_changes
The reality is that sometimes the wiki communities can make poor decisions. But Sj and Brion and others have, in my opinion, tried to stress that it's okay for people to be wrong and it's okay to try things out. But it's always been a balancing act.
If there aren't technical, legal, or fundamental philosophical issues with a wiki configuration change, when should and shouldn't it be allowed? And who ultimately decides (e.g., stewards)? I think that's roughly what we're looking at right now. The past process has sometimes relied on collective and intentional deafness (via Bugzilla or mailing lists or whatever) and that isn't really still suitable these days, I don't think.
Defining the third category (fundamental philosophical issues) is tricky, but retaining open content licenses, the ability of people to easily contribute, etc. are the types of things I'm talking about. Deeply held shared values, not "I think Web users should always have a lightbox when they click an image." That's an aesthetic choice that should probably be left up to individual communities unless we can find a compelling reason not to (e.g., having an identical user experience across Wikimedia wikis by globally enabling MediaViewer is not a fundamental philosophical issue and these types of aesthetic choices have never been considered as such).
It's appropriate for WMF to take into account the full breadth and depth of devices that do exist and are in wide usage, more so than sites developed for users in rich countries. Hence a greater focus on things like image compression, overall page footprint, the no-JavaScript experience, etc. But that's still consistent with carefully updating the presentation. (Introducing a lightbox viewer in 2014 is not exactly a radically new vision for user experience.)
Yes. Performance is important. Graceful degradation is important.
People have cited WikiWand as an example of a third party improved reader experience. It's quite nicely done; I like a lot of the design choices they've made. It's far from a threat (though a more prominent "Edit" link would be nice, especially since the browser extension hijacks wikipedia.org views), but it's the kind of cool third party effort that keeps us honest. They recently raised about $600K in funding, which means that at least some people believe there's a real demand for a nicer, more modern default reader experience.
At http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/08/21/216217/ Andreas Kolbe discusses WikiWand. In Andreas' view, "the Wikimedia Foundation is afraid it will lose readers to sites like WikiWand that offer Wikipedia content as a pure consumable with a much more aesthetically pleasing interface. The moment Wikipedia page views go down, the Alexa rank will go down and donations will go down, as fewer people will see the fundraising banners."
Pi zero at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/9622503 writes, "The non-Wikipedian sisters are the growth sector of the wikimedian movement, and the WMF by dissing them is strangling the wikimedian movement's best chance of having a vigorous future, with Wikipedia embedded in a thriving ecosystem of wikimedian sisters augmenting each other's strengths."
Meanwhile Lila has been repeatedly emphasizing priorities and prioritization on Meta-Wiki (in seven distinct posts, by my count). There are vague references to the "prioritization pipeline," but in addition to the issue of deciding wiki configuration changes, discussed above, we also need to clearly define what that pipeline looks like and how it behaves. Pine and others have been discussing a Technology Committee that could possibly bridge the Board, Wikimedia Foundation staff, and the editing communities. But who knows if such an idea is viable or desirable.
There is lots and lots to think about right now.
MZMcBride